


move into my airspace

by swingingparty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: ? - Freeform, Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Pre-Canon, Pre-Sburb/Sgrub, bro strider freak behavior, what listening to interpol does to a mf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 05:02:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26769934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swingingparty/pseuds/swingingparty
Summary: Rose might call it a Freudian slip, whatever the fuck that means. You’d call it a mistake so stupid it virtually rewrites the definition of the word. Bro would call it an excuse to speedrun acquainting your face with the concrete of the roof above you, but for whatever reason, he doesn’t so much as blink in your direction at the sound.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 41





	move into my airspace

**Author's Note:**

> i was thinking a lot about dave strider and also a lot about apologies and also have been listening to inordinate amounts of interpol as of late so this um happened! title is frm say hello to the angels by interpol hope u enjoy :] 
> 
> dedicated to nia vantas bc they let me be such a freak about dave 24/7 hi nia ilysm

You know about the squeaky stair.

This is one of those facts of life that’s just been drilled into you for as long as you remember. The sky is blue. The capital of Texas is Houston. The fourth stair from the bottom makes a noise no matter how you step on it. You know this. You’ve known this since before you were even able to recite other facts of life like sky colors and state capitals; instinct and experience meshed perfectly in order to drill that particular tidbit deep into the very core of your brain.

And it's not even like you were too out of it to remember. Tired and groggy from a mid-afternoon power nap turned into a full-blown eight-hour sleep, sure. Hungry as all fuck? Completely—why do you think you were venturing downstairs at one in the goddamn morning anyhow? But so incoherent you couldn’t even remember what step to avoid to save yourself an ass-kicking? Fuck no. That shit is inherent. Forget that and you might as well forget your own last name.

Which is why, when you feel your foot connecting with the very same infamous stair, the wood underneath already letting out a round of protest even as you only rest a fraction of your weight on it, the first thing you feel isn’t shock, or terror, or even panic: it’s surprise.

It’s just a quick burst of surprise. 

Then you see him—seated on the couch, feet up against the coffee table, TV remote by his side, expression caught between apathetic and bored like it always is. He’s close enough to hear you breathe a little funny, never-fucking-mind hear the staircase start to protest like it’s two seconds from collapsing in on itself, and it takes a few seconds for this realization to sink in—he can hear you. He literally  _ just _ heard you. 

And  _ then  _ there’s the panic.

Rose might call it a Freudian slip, whatever the fuck that means. You’d call it a mistake so stupid it virtually rewrites the definition of the word. Bro would call it an excuse to speedrun acquainting your face with the concrete of the roof above you, but for whatever reason, he doesn’t so much as blink in your direction at the sound.

At least you don’t think he does. It’s hard to tell, with the shades.

For a second you stand there, weight still awkwardly balanced on the step behind you, grabbing ahold of the banister like your literal life depends on it— and really, a small, unhelpful part of your brain whispers, how long until that’s not just hyperbole anymore?—totally at a loss for what to do. You could abscond up to your room, you could continue your trek downstairs and take whatever shit is inevitably going to get thrown at you like a man, you could stand here until whatever god that still gives even the vaguest hint of a fuck about you finally decides to do you a solid and opens a pit up underneath your feet and send you hurtling down to the center of the universe. Shit isn’t exactly limited here.

You’re still deliberating between options—if standing stock-still counting the seconds between each inhale and exhale you take while a phantom loop of white noise starts to pick up in the back of your head counts as deliberating—an itchy feeling starting to work its way up your sternum at your lack of response when Bro clears his throat, twitches his head like he’s shaking off a fly, and turns to face you with a snap. 

He’s still white-knuckling the Coke can, the force of his grip just shy of strong enough to crush it in his hand; you can see, through the gloom, the way the metal warps under his fingertips, light dancing off of it in irregular lines, and a dull thrill of horror shoots up your spine.

You could still move if you wanted to, but you don’t. Somehow, you get the feeling that whatever option you take would lead right back to him, anyways. 

“Yo,” he says into the silence. The light from the television washes him dull grey, making the angles of his cheekbones, his jaw, the column of his throat stand out like sharpie on printer paper. The scars scattered sparsely across his forearms and face glow almost white, curling across the surface of his skin like miniature snakes. 

The mental image that conjures up makes your mouth dry. On the TV, the scene changes, and the lighting around Bro goes red, washing the walls like bloodstains.

“Yo,” you force out. There’s no reason for you to be unnerved by the scene unfolding before you at your feet, which is why you’re all the more dimly confused when your voice barely rises above the level of a rasp. You cough, swallow, try again. “Yo.”

His lips twitch. It’s not quite a smile—he and you don’t do the whole smiling thing, not really; he calls it a wuss move, and you’re inclined to agree, if only to spare your own ass—but it’s as close as he gets to the expression, which either means he’s in as good a mood as you’ll ever see or he’s already finished plotting out the exact course his feet are going to take across the carpet as he heads across the room to the stairs leading up to the roof, one hand already on the hilt of his katana, the other fisted around the collar of your shirt. Which response you’re going to get is always fifty-fifty down to the decimal; you gave up predicting which side the coin was going to land on a long time ago. 

It doesn't stop you from bracing yourself, though, but you figure that’s not too out of pocket, not too weird. After all, he’s raising you, teaching you, training you to be like this—always on your toes, always anticipating the impact, always ready—and really, is that such a bad thing?

You’re not afforded the space to answer. Bro jerks his head at you, lips still twitching upward in that bizarre, paradoxical half-smile, half-grimace he always pulls, and pats the space on the couch beside him with his free hand. You follow the motion, body on autopilot. 

The couch dips as you sit on it, stiff leather creaking under your weight. Bro found the thing on a street corner driving back from the store one night when you were little, back when he owned a car and still put up the pretense of giving even half a shit about shopping for you. It still reeks of asphalt and oil and beer. The scent fills your nose as you sink back into the cushions, making your head swim; you have to blink a few times to focus your gaze on the TV playing in front of you. After a second, the image of a newscaster swims into view, her hair fluttering in the breeze as she stands by the side of a freeway, the light from the cameras trained on her turning her skin almost translucent. She talks a mile a minute, mouth moving in an incomprehensible blur. The volume of the TV is switched all the way down. You can hear Bro’s breathing rasping in the back of his throat. 

“What’s on?” you say, folding your hands in your lap. 

It’s a stupid question—Bro has never once given a shit about what’s on TV while he’s watching; you’re convinced he only turns the thing on just so he can have something to direct his attention to that’s not the sound of your footsteps echoing around from upstairs. But the quiet is grating against your nerves like knees against a rug, dull and searing, and you’re half-convinced that if you sit there in silence for any longer you’re going to explode. 

He has a funny way, Bro, of making the in-between periods feel like tests. You suppose there’s a lot of value to it training-wise— _ keepin’ you on your toes, lil man,  _ a voice that sounds like him says in the back of your head, and to your credit, it only makes you grimace a little—but you’d be a liar through and through if you said it wasn’t unnerving as all fuck sometimes. The ass-kicking you know how to hold your ground against, and if you can’t do that you at least know how to grapple with the aftermath. You’re good at talking the blows as they come in real-time, but bracing for them is an entirely different thing, and one you’re not very good at. Something about the waiting just gets to you, you guess. Something about knowing what’s coming next but not being able to do anything to stop it.

Which, you know, is dumb as fuck, and also probably the point. Training encompasses everything, not just the moments you’re lying sprawled out on your back with gravel in your hair and a blade at your trachea. You gotta learn how to play the waiting game someday as well. 

The voice in your head that says that sounds an awful lot like Bro, too. You push it aside with as much vigor as possible.

“Crash report,” Bro says suddenly, and it takes an effort of galactic fucking proportions not to flinch out of your skin at the sound of his voice. He never yells—it’s one of those funny things about him, ironic in a way that makes your stomach hurt when you think too much about it—but the deliberation he speaks with never fails to set your teeth on edge. “Kid took his daddy’s car out for a joyride, or some shit. Pissed outta his fuckin’ skull, flipped the damn thing off the side of the road.” He tips his chin at the TV, raising his Coke can in a quasi-salute. The light from the screen flashes against the metal, and for a second you think of swords and searing hot tarmac burning patterns into you back, and then you stop thinking completely.

Instead, you fold your hands some more, trying to make the motion as deliberate as the way Bro speaks. It’s all about the parroting, you’ve come to realize. Especially considering you have the best model for anything you could try to be seated right next to you. “Is the kid okay?”

You feel the scathing look Bro gives you wash over you like acid, burning straight into your bones. Of course it doesn’t matter if the kid is okay. You bite back another grimace. Dumb fucking thing to even think of in the first place.

But for all his side-eyes, Bro still doesn’t so much as lift a finger in your direction; instead, he just knocks back another mouthful of Coke with all the precision of some age-old medical professional performing brain surgery. You watch the column of his throat shift as he swallows.

“Paramed called to the scene,” Bro says. “Kid busted his brains out on the tarmac.” His lips twist in something that could be a look of pain but could equally possibly be a smile. “Don’t think it’ll do the motherfucker much good at this point, but, hey.” Another swig. “Thought that counts.”

You lock your fingers together, digging your fingertips into the spaces between your knuckles. “Damn.”

Bro grunts. Then, with a motion so sudden you really do flinch—not quite out of your skin, but give it two seconds and a piece of assorted weaponry materializing in Bro’s hand and you might get to that point—he reaches over to the coffee table in front of you, grabs the remote, and switches the TV off.

The room drops into darkness in an instant, the only light emanating from the half-blown out bulb in the kitchen that doesn’t turn off anymore. Bro leans forward, elbows on his knees, fists pressed against his mouth. Without the dull murmur from the news report to cut back the silence fractionally, the sound of his breathing is even louder, scraping against the insides of your skull in a way that makes your skin crawl. The light from the kitchen throws him into dull relief, the scars on his face even more pronounced in the new levels of gloom. You focus your gaze on the most visible one, a long-since healed gash running from the corner of his eye to the edge of his jawbone.

You gave it to him when you were ten. It was the first blow of substance you landed on him, the first hit you got that made him jerk back, releasing his hold on you to cup his hand to his face as the collar of his polo already started to stain red, and the vindication you had felt in that moment had been so strong you had thrown up in the shower ten minutes later.

You picked up a policy after that moment: don’t hurt him. Fight hard enough for him to be satisfied, fight hard enough for him to back off long enough for you to catch your breath and lick your wounds and go respond to the unanswered Pesterchum messages piling up in your inbox, but don’t hurt him. It worked for about a week and a half before Bro cottoned onto the new tactic. One ass beating of the century and a narrowly avoided trip to the ER later and you left that strategy to rot.

You still don’t like to kick his ass even in the rare moments when you can, but it’s sort of a moot point. If there’s anything that training has taught you, it’s that going full throttle whenever and wherever possible is the best move, if only to save your own ass.

Beside you, Bro sighs, the sound snapping you back into reality like a broken rubber band. Your nose fills with the smell of couch mixed with the weird metallic-y odor that always emanates from Bro in a rush as he drops his hands and turns to you, mouth twisting a little.

“How’s the face?”

For a split second, you have no clue what he’s talking about. Parrot all you may, but some of the confusion must bleed through your half-assed attempt at a poker face, because without warning, Bro reaches out, probably you assess the injury in question. Or at least he tries. Your brain sees some indeterminate shape moving towards the side of your head from the corner of your eye and then, before you even have the chance to mentally react, your own hand jerks out to slap his away.

The noise isn’t loud in itself—the sound of skin on skin, knuckles on knuckles—but in the dense quiet of the living room, it feels like the equivalent of someone firing a shotgun right inside your ear canal. The back of your hand stings where it connected with his, but that sensation goes paper-white in the face of the searing feeling that washes over you as Bro gives you a slow, steady once over.

His hand hangs suspended in the air beside him, fingers half-curled around nothing. It will take him an instant to get his katana, even less time to start going seven straight shades of shit on your ass. There aren’t any house rules but you can’t help but feel like you just violated some untold sacrament that’s been hanging over your head since day one—hands off the fucking art, you think, the phantom shape of a laugh cutting through your chest—and you’re about to pay the price and then some for it. 

“Sorry,” you force out, because it’s always the waiting, always the in-between that gets to you, isn’t it? “Sorry, I didn’t—”

“Shut up,” he says, voice flat as concrete, and then his hand is on your face, wrapping around your chin, jerking it to the side.

For all the words you know, all your knowledge of how to translate feelings, all the fancy rhetoric and metaphor you're absorbed via osmosis throughout the tenure of your friendship with Rose Lalonde, there is never going to be enough language at your fingertips to explain the distinct sensation that washes over you the second Bro touches you. It’s the drop on a rollercoaster that keeps going down. It’s the sucker punch that never lands but still rips the breath from your lungs so violently you can feel the places where the molecules of air used to be seconds before. It’s the adrenaline of a thousand in-between moments condensed into one single, sickening suspension of the world around you.

It’s all of that, and it makes no fucking sense. For all his pitfalls, all his shitty sideways tendencies, all the swords in the fridge and the puppets on the banister and the bloodstains on his clothes that didn’t come from him, he’s a good man. He’s a good man and, more importantly, he’s good for you. Sure, the definition applied here might be a little more than unconventional but it gets the job done.  _ He  _ gets the job done—for both of you. What the fuck do you think all that training is for, huh? He wouldn't be doing it if that wasn’t the case.

You can feel the  _ right? _ there, the empty space at the end of the thought where it should be, and it just makes you feel sicker. Bro’s hand tightens on your face, and, yeah, no, it’s fine. This is just how things are. The heel of his hand digs into your throat as you swallow, audibly, painfully. This is normal. 

“How’s the face?” he asks again. 

Three days ago Bro had sent you sprawling into a concrete wall during a late-night strife. All and all, not the worst encounter you’d ever sustained with him—or the wall, for the matter—but still bad enough to leave a pretty nasty bruise-cut-combo decorating the left side of your face. You’d done a good job of ignoring the still-healing injury every time you looked in the mirror—something about the reminder, not that that’s anything you particularly want to dwell on, either—but apparently Bro hadn’t. You feel his free hand ghost over the mark as he jerks your head to the side again. Your neck gives a dull twinge of protest, and you don’t even bother to dignify it with a reaction—something tells you complaining wouldn’t do anything to improve the already-tight expression working its way across Bro’s face. You know what to do here now: keep quiet and keep still and wait for him to finish whatever he wants to do. And then you mitigate whatever you can and ignore whatever you can’t. It’s a well-worn routine, comforting in the familiarity even as the sameness of it all makes your stomach harden. You focus on the former feeling as much as you can; at least you know how to deal with him like this. At least this isn’t anything new.

_ Right? _

With an almost sickening amount of gentleness, Bro ghosts his thumb across your cheekbone. Then, even before the nausea that gesture sent shooting through you has fully faded, he presses down on the bruise, the gesture sharp and unrelenting. Your teeth grit together so hard you nearly bite your tongue off as a spike of pain shoots to some middle distance right behind your eye. Fucking  _ hell _ .

“Does that hurt?” Bro asks, and if you were stupid, you’d almost call his tone gentle.

Thankfully, you’re not—again, the familiarity. “No,” you say with his hand still clamped around your jaw and a stabbing sensation starting to drill into the center of your skull. “‘S fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” You grit your teeth harder. “‘M sure.” 

“I got you good,” Bro says, and now you can read his tone for what it is: vague wonderment. Like he’s looking at Fourth of July fireworks, or something.  _ Fucking hell.  _ “Huh?”

You shrug as much as the awkward position Bro’s worked you into allows. “‘S’all good.”

He drops your face.

“The kid on the TV,” he says, shifting back to his earlier position with his elbows on his knees, shoulders hunched. “Wanna know why he took that car?”

It takes you a second to realize you can move now, much less open your mouth wide enough to speak. For a second, you’re too busy concentrating on shifting away from Bro as subtly as possible so as not to rile him up any more than he already is right now, but then he gives a sharp exhale, the sound almost derisive, and you realize he’s waiting on a response.

Of course. The one night he wants to talk. Of fucking course.

“Why?” you say. Your words feel clunky and awkward, marbles rolling around the inside of your mouth. Something about adrenaline rushes floats to the surface of your mind; you give it as distasteful a look as you can manage and kick it back under the water. “What happened?”

“His daddy—” Bro’s voice breaks off like a bone snapping in two. You watch the expression on his face go from blank to virtually nonexistent in a split second. “Kid was runnin’ away. Tryin’ to get outta here. Got himself motherfuckin’ killed in the process, wouldja believe.”

There’s something about the way he speaks here, so unsettlingly uncertain in comparison to the usual ease he spits out whatever’s on his mind that sends a chill running from the base of your neck to the end of your spine. You can’t tell if this is a threat or an offhand example or something in between— _ always the in-betweens _ , you think, a dry laugh you can’t bring yourself to cough up floating around the back of your throat,  _ always the fucking in-betweens. _

You can’t tell if it’s a promise or an apology on his part, and something inside you says you might not want to figure out the answer, either. 

Last Christmas Bro sold the car. He never told you why.

“I do this for your own good, y’know?” he says, shifts, palms pressing against his knees now. “All this shit—it’s training, lil man. You ain’t gonna get this kinda learning anywhere else but here.”

The marbles in your mouth roll around a little bit more. Suddenly you’re so fucking tired it’s hard to see straight. “Yeah.”

“I do this shit for you.” 

“I know.”

The look he gives you is long and hard through the shades. You can see his mouth working in the dark, chewing on sentences he’s never going to spit out. His gaze fixes back on your cheek, back on the bruise, and a weird, tiny part of you wants to show him everything. Every mark and scar, every reminder of training that’s supposed to be oh-so-fucking good for you.

Even though it is. Even though you know it is—you know it is, it’s just—

“Want a drink?”

He’s standing. The TV is back on, the room washed in grey. He’s looking down at you now, shades pushed up to the top of the bridge of his nose, mouth flattened back into its customary hard line. You can see bloodstains on the hem of his shirt, standing out black against white in the gloom, and it’s your blood, isn’t it? It’s your blood and something inside you tightens and tightens and tightens.

“Lil man,” he tries again, tone precise as always like a punch to the nose, a concrete wall to the face. 

A part of you wants him to see the reminders, so maybe they can stop being yours and start being his. 

“What do we have?”

“Coke. AJ.”

“AJ.”

“Okay.”

The sound of his footfalls fades into the distance as he moves into the kitchen and tugs the fridge door open, a faint buzzing picking up in the background, mingling with the murmur from the TV to form a heady sort of white noise that fills your head up like cotton balls. You feel the absence where he was just sitting on the couch next to you like there’s a Bro-shaped hole in the space around you, a rip in the fabric of the universe, your very own black hole.

You close your eyes. 


End file.
